Betsy's Page
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Obama's arrogance
James Taranto has a comment on Obama's arguments about those small town citizens. Taranto asks what I've been wondering - what is it that any of these candidates can do for these towns that used to revolve around some manufacturing plant that has closed down?Obama's promise rests on a false premise: that it is within the power of the president to restore the Rust Belt's luster. Every incumbent president in living memory has sought at least one additional term, and the Keystone State has for decades been a key electoral battleground, both large and closely contested. If presidents had the power to make Pennsylvania's declining towns wealthy, don't you think one of them would have done so by now?Just as it irritated me to hear Mitt Romney promise to restore the car industry in Michigan, this pretense that there is something a president can do to turn back the clock to a time when a union worker at a factory could count on working at the local factory all his life, retire comfortably and anticipate his son having that same opportunity.
In truth, the decline of industries is simply a fact of life, like old age, sickness and death. Yet just as new generations supersede the old, a free economy produces innovation that gives rise to new industries. And while some places have declined, the nationwide economy has grown impressively for most of the past quarter-century.
It's a very tough experience to have these economies change. These communities and states need to address how to adapt to the new reality. The Detroit Free Press has an article today looking at Pittsburgh and the lessons that Detroit, certainly a city suffering from economic transformations, can learn from how Pittsburgh adapted to the decline of the steel industry.Some of the key lessons:There is a lot more that Detroit should be paying attention to. But these are changes that a community itself, with the help of the state, should be making. They are not the responsibility of the president. The federal government doesn't need to be helping Pittsburgh lure entrepreneurs to one region of the country to the detriment of some other region. That is the role of the local governments. All the job retraining programs won't do any good if there aren't jobs available for the newly retrained workers. As Taranto so perceptively points out, if it were so easy to help a depressed Rust Belt, previous presidents would have already done so.
• More attention should have been paid to the importance of entrepreneurism. The Pittsburgh region lags in the rate of new businesses formed, according to Pittsburgh TODAY, an online report card about the region.
Business leaders tried to lure big companies to the area rather than creating an entrepreneurial culture, despite having universities and corporate research and development in the area, said Harold Miller, a local consultant and a former president of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development.
• Pittsburgh should have acted quicker to develop other industries that steelworkers could transition into rather than initially trying to bring the steel mills back, said Barry Maciak, director of the Center for Competitive Workforce Development at Duquesne University.
"We spent a lot of time trying to save what couldn't be saved," he said. "When it's over, sometimes it's over."
Taranto goes on to contrast Obama's attitude towards those poor benighted Midwesterners who cling to their cultural beliefs in tough economic times.Unlike Ayn Rand, Feingold and Obama see selfishness as a virtue only for bitter-off cultural conservatives. The well-heeled San Francisco Democrats Obama addressed on Friday stand to pay much higher taxes if he is elected. Many of them no doubt back Obama because they like his liberal positions on subjects like guns, abortion and same-sex marriage. If you think Obama criticized their priorities, we've got some change you can believe in. In Barack Obama's America, rich people who vote on cultural issues rather than economic self-interest are principled and self-sacrificing. People of more modest means who do so are credulous and bitter.The irony is rich. All these rich elites, billionaires many of them, ignore their own material benefit to vote against Republicans, but are angry when lower class voters supposedly ignore their material self-interest to vote for Republicans.
As Bill Kristol points out today, Obama's quote about those bitter Midwesterners reminded him of Karl Marx.This sent me to Marx’s famous statement about religion in the introduction to his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”:But Obama seems to feel that he has much greater insight into people's true motivations. He knows why they cling to their religion and guns. He understands their bigotry. He knows the real reason they oppose free trade (and is quite willing to cater to their irrational frees) and illegal immigration. For a guy who hasn't spent much time in small-town America, he seems to know a lot about their inner psyches.
“Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.”
Or, more succinctly, and in the original German in which Marx somehow always sounds better: “Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes.”
Now, this is a point of view with a long intellectual pedigree prior to Marx, and many vocal adherents continuing into the 21st century. I don’t believe the claim is true, but it’s certainly worth considering, in college classrooms and beyond.
But it’s one thing for a German thinker to assert that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature.” It’s another thing for an American presidential candidate to claim that we “cling to ... religion” out of economic frustration.
And it’s a particularly odd claim for Barack Obama to make. After all, in his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, he emphasized with pride that blue-state Americans, too, “worship an awesome God.”
What’s more, he’s written eloquently in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” of his own religious awakening upon hearing the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “Audacity of Hope” sermon, and of the complexity of his religious commitment. You’d think he’d do other believers the courtesy of assuming they’ve also thought about their religious beliefs.What does this mean for Obama’s presidential prospects? He’s disdainful of small-town America — one might say, of bourgeois America. He’s usually good at disguising this. But in San Francisco the mask slipped. And it’s not so easy to get elected by a citizenry you patronize.As Hugh Hewitt points out, Obama isn't that familiar with these small-town people that he is so sure that he understands so well.
And what are the grounds for his supercilious disdain? If he were a war hero, if he had a career of remarkable civic achievement or public service — then he could perhaps be excused an unattractive but in a sense understandable hauteur. But what has Barack Obama accomplished that entitles him to look down on his fellow Americans?What Obama knows is the world in which he has lived, which is a strange combination of some of the toughest neighborhoods in the U.S. and its most elite institutions. He belonged to a church that indulged radical politics in its weekly bulletin and from its pulpit even as it struggled to help some devastated neighborhoods. He did so after attending and absorbing the attitudes of America's most elite law school and having been taught by its --mostly-- hard-left professors. He does so from the lofty perch of the U.S. Senate. He's had a schizophrenic life that combined the toughest aspects of America and its most indulgent.Almost a month ago Ron Fournier talked about how Obama was bordering on arrogance. I think we're seeing that arrogance fully on display right now.
No wonder he is clueless about "flyover land."
Of course, in Obama's mind, any storyline that makes him look bad is, as Jim Geraghty points out, simply a "one more distraction from the critical debate that we must have in this election season."Then, once again, this is a "distraction" from what Obama wants to talk about. Whenever an issue comes along that reflects badly on him, it's a distraction from the "real issues." But what if Americans want to talk about this? What if they really think that an aspiring president looks down on them, and doesn't understand life in small town America? What if that's a critical debate and real issue to them?Nyah, that's just probably their own frustrations and bitterness that makes them want to talk about such distractions.
This whole episode reminds me of a teacher who taught for one year at our school. The day after the 2004 election I happened to run into him and he said, quite bitterly, "It's a shame that hundreds of thousands of Ohioans voted against their own self-interest." I was really shocked because I didn't know this guy well at all and people at our school usually don't make such blatantly political statements unless they know already that the other person is of a like mind. I replied that it was rather arrogant of him to think that he knew better about why other people should be voting than they did. And he answered, "I know. Trust me, I know." Later on, this teacher was, er, invited not to return to our school. Charter schools have that flexibility. And I learned that, among the many complaints about his teaching, were complaints from parents, including some who I know are quite liberal, that this guy was bringing politics into the classroom. I hope he's taken his arrogance somewhere where it's more welcome. And I hope that Obama will endure a similar fate in this year's election.Labels: Obama
